Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead
Hello my friend,
I didn’t know how much meaning the words “His mercies are new every morning” could have. To get up every single morning and have the new day to shape… it’s beautiful.
I’m writing to you this morning because I saw a decision by someone I follow online to separate from her husband. For now, maybe forever. I felt the hesitance in every line as she shared what she could share in so public a place, but also a bold wind of courage flowing through her. Something which, even though it was beyond hard for her, was also giving her hope of new life.
My fundamental upbringing always cringes when these things come up. In my micro culture divorce was a dirty word at best and a blasphemy at worst. It’s like the unforgivable sin to many in my world. I understand this type of thinking, because it is true that we cannot shape truth to what we want it to be or it loses its integrity and purity.
On the other hand, sometimes to follow truth we have to leave everything and everyone we know. Jesus said so himself. Sometimes we get caught in between a rock and hard spot so impossible, that our path can only lead to a death of what we had, in order to have a life that is fully surrendered to God.
It’s not an easy answer, by which I mean it might take years to pound out an answer. I saw the agony in her decision, mostly because I was primed to see it. My brother’s first marriage was incredibly difficult. I won’t say much here to respect his sense of privacy but it was an impossible situation in which he did his best; I know he did because that’s the way he lives life.
There’s something inside us that thinks someone could have just tried a little harder. A little further, and they could have seen a different result. I like that idea too, there’s glory in that idea. There’s honor in that idea. There’s grit and resilience and endurance in that idea. Humans really are incredible creatures. I have no doubt about that, and no doubt that surrender only means as much as effort we put into getting through on our own. If the marriages that are maintaining would put even half of the effort in as some of the ones who eventually broke the covenant, their own marriage would be incredible.
Not every mountain is the same height.
There is the belief that we have when we are untested. Then there is the belief we have when we are tested beyond our endurance. Those are two vastly different belief systems. Growing up it was easy for me to condemn divorce because it never touched me in my superior little Menno world. Friend, if there is one thing that reduces me to tears it is seeing how proud I have been in my life. How very little I understood the heart of God and the heart of people. I still don’t, but I’ve received a few hard knocks which make me take a pause of humility.
I want the ease of a formula. It would be much easier to stand up and staunchly say, “thou shalt not divorce.”
Divorce (by way of removing some of the sound reverberations some of us hear when this word comes up) is the breaking of a covenant. The spiritual death that the Bible talks about is one that breaks the covenant of death for us, so that we can make a new covenant with God. Getting a divorce is essentially resigning your marriage over to death.
My question was, just how much of a resurrection and redemption is possible?
I’m not a theologian, as you know, and have no intentions of approaching the topic that way. This is a friend to friend letter. If you want the Biblical defense, I highly highly recommend this 3 hour talk by Mike Winger. It’s incredible and beautiful.
When trying to reconcile my belief that divorce and remarriage was wrong in the light of a brother I loved getting divorced and eventually remarried, I had to decide what this meant in the context of life. Would I have to “leave him behind” and shun our relationship (a kind of familial divorce) or continue the relationship and “accept” his choices?
See the impossibility of it? I wasn’t capable of seeing the choices in any other light at that time, and add to that, I was 16. Was Jesus’ call to leave behind everything for the truth applicable to my decisions, or also to the decisions my brother makes?
“What is truth?”
It tore our family apart for awhile, though to be fair there were dysfunctions leading up to that point which had set the stage for everything. The divorce was something we couldn’t ignore like we had ignored other things. It brought our feet up to the fire and held us there. It is very good for humans to be brought to these do or die points. You know? It hurts like hell, but it teaches us to know what Heaven means.
Eventually my brother remarried, after extensive study into the heart of what scripture says on the topic. Not a black and white formula, as we think (and Mike W. covers in the above video) but a truth which transforms us beyond the point of death. To be perfectly honest, friend, I still wouldn’t be able to give out a theological defense on this topic. All I’ve been able to manage personally is death of my self and surrender to Jesus.
As a family, we’ve all been getting to that point. I don’t know if we are wrong or right, even to this day. There are some things which just don’t fit into those black or white scenarios which humans understand as truth. All I know is I watched my mom nearly kill herself, torn between a son and her beliefs. I saw her eventually put her son into God’s hands and start to heal, and as she did her new daughter-in-law became one of her greatest supports in life in a way her own daughters (out of state) haven’t been able to do. I saw her nearly panic at the thought of seeing the evidence of failed motherhood, to being able to be a mom again in the strength of Jesus. I saw my new niece finally able to have a stable, committed, and faithful dad. I saw my dad and brother build a better relationship than they ever had before. I see evidence of a redemption growing up in all our lives, a return to love and life and forgiveness. I saw us emotionally waking up, and connecting in new ways. There are evidences of new life everywhere.
I’m seeing a family restored, and covenant marriage restored to my brother. I don’t know what to do with those things. The older, younger me would have said that it was wrong. That it was living in sin. But I’ve seen the results of sin. They are a lack of humility. They are a lack of love. They are a lack of redemption. They are human efforts at righteousness.
I wish I could wrap this up in a neat bow. I wish I could say “do the right thing” and have that be the end of it. But the entire Gospel is predicated on us not being able to do the right thing and I thank God that I now know this down to the bottom of my heart. Not as an excuse for sin, but as power over it.
I thank God that he doesn’t say, “do the right thing and you will be saved.” He exposed our hearts as unable to do the right thing and gave us a way through this death to surrender and new life.
One thing I have seen is that this grace does not take away or add to the law, but rather fulfills it. Divorce is wrong. So was my pride. This is what the law does. It exposes our hearts and lives and how we fall short of the glory of God. When we try to restore our own glory by a strict adherence to every letter of the law we do not correct this human condition. We may keep a certain order and peace in the land, but it does diddly squat to actually bringing us to Christ unless we let it bring us to the point of our own death. The law does not give life. It cannot.
This is surrender: the willingness to face chaos for the call of Jesus. It’s damn hard (you know I only use strong language for a very specific reason) but the person who has experienced the death, knows the true meaning of life is not in personal grit, but in being found in the hope and redemption of God.
When I saw this woman’s path was on this road I’ll tell you the truth, I felt that old familiar twinge of righteousness over seeing the law attacked. Thank God it was immediately followed with the hope that for hearts which are broken beyond human repair, law and death is only the final end if that is their choice. There is a higher reality, a truth, a person, who has come to fulfill the law and bring us beyond ourselves.
I used to think that the divorced person just had to be broken forever, but now I think they know a little faster what takes the rest of us awhile: we are all broken, and the person who arrives at this conclusion faster is a step ahead of those of us blinded by our strict adherence to the law.
Not every broken person knows Jesus, but to the person who sees their genuine need and inability to justify themselves, there is a leg up to entering the the kingdom of God. It’s hard for rich people to enter into the kingdom of heaven, not because of money, but because of people like me in my secure Menno bubble who never knew what it was like to reckon with the brokenness of marriage or community. Who was never shaken up and unsettled in lawful pride. The law was perfectly adequate for me because I lived by it, and was therefore judged by it even as I judged.
Until God in severe mercy shook me inside outside upside down. What a gift that was to me.
I think of this often in the current political climate. God’s kingdom is not a kingdom of politics, but we are living tension between being surrendered to one, and ruled by the other. All the time, I face the choice of knowing what is my decision to make in regards to the truth, and what is my brother’s decision. When to stand and when to bow. When to submit and when to fight.
Where the clash between the reality of God’s kingdom and the current earthly one happens, I try to remember that sometimes in the impossible there is something which does not abolish the law, but has come to fulfill it. Law is a good thing, and I’ve deeply appreciated the rule of law in my country, but from experience I can see that God has a bigger plan going on here. One which will bring a broken and humble people restoration.
I have lived inside the impossibility of law, and now I live in the freedom of it. Law itself is the schoolmaster which teaches us truth, but it is not the truth. The truth will set us free.
Remind me often, friend, if I forget. The path to freedom is not in the exercise of perfect law, but in whether or not it brings us to a deeper truth that supersedes the finality of brokenness. Tell me about the Pharisees who tried to trap Jesus by asking him if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath. Remind me that the concept of Sabbath is not about the law, but about a God who rested on the 7th day in holy goodness.
Sometimes I like those questionable songs like “I wish Nothing but the Best for You Two” because for all of life we humans get caught in these tensions of the perfection of law, and the goodness of God. We are in the “almost but not yet” as my pastor coworker likes to say. We see what should be, but even so, can’t attain to it. I have fallen back on law for answers, but they never set me free. They are non human answers.
Jesus though, he became human. Isn’t that crazy? He did what the law could not.
Love you,
L. Raine
